Children of Eternity: Being the First Part of the Apocalis
Macaulay Christian
Publication date: March 10th 2026
Genres: Adult, Science Fiction
Thirty years ago, an impossible transmission pierced the cosmos. Hidden within it were instructions for a device no one fully understood—an extragalactic Telegraph built to answer the call.
On a distant world in neutral space, humanity and its former enemies resolved to build the device, a rare moment of unity and a calculated gamble that shared purpose might overcome politics.
The answer is not what anyone expected.
The colony is devastated. Reality fractures. Technology fails. People vanish without a trace—among them soldiers, citizens, and voices no civilization can afford to lose. Aboard the warship Banterra, Captain Heron Agathon is dispatched into the unknown to search for survivors and the truth behind the signal.
Beyond the galaxy’s edge, something older than civilization is observing humanity’s first steps into the uncharted—measuring what it will become when fear, power, and principle collide. The answers lie in the dark between stars. And the truth behind the signal is older—and nearer—than anyone suspects. There is no going back.
The human adventure is about to begin.
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EXCERPT:
P R O L O G U E
holindrian returns
A shimmering light fell all around Holindrian, hoisting him high into the sky, his feet dangling beneath. First, he could see just the top of the palace as he rose through the dense black smoke. A little higher and he could see the city itself. Fires burning, consuming whole wards at a time. The sounds were muffled, but he knew there would be the clanging of swords, the whizzing of arrows, and the miserable, painful screams of wretched, dying souls. Higher, Holindrian continued to rise. Boats had sunken in the harbor. The fighting on the rocky hills surrounding the town seemed to have calmed. A haboob traveled in a northeasterly direction, a transitory wall of brown, choking death.
The light continued to shine. All the colors of the rainbow streamed down, carrying him up, up into the clouds. He was higher than the mountains! There seemed to be no limits to his ascent. The definitions, the contours, the distinctive features of the land blurred together. Muted, people vanished into minute dark specks, fields became strokes of green, the clouds white wisps overlaying the canvas. He could see the whole of the blue world from up here….
Holindrian stood alone in a hallway with concave walls of a featureless white. He could not be certain what the material was. It was surely not any metal familiar to him. Everything seemed pristine. Not a blemish or scuff mark to be found. Feeling his eyes wince, he thought the white of the walls too bright, beyond adept description by man. No marble stone or cloud or snowflake compared. They seemed to be pulsating. Flashes of an even more intense white coursed through their…veins? As though the walls were alive, as though this vessel were alive.
The ceiling was black. Not just black but the absence of all light, the deepest shade of black imaginable. It contrasted brilliantly with the sterile surfaces of the walls. The black was not uniform in its composition, but rather composed of discernible shades of navy and violet and…were those stars? Stars sparkled and glimmered, specks of diamonds in a cave of darkness. It was remarkable how similar the ceiling was to the night sky.
When he looked down, and saw that the floor mirrored the ceiling, Holindrian first thought his heart might permanently lodge itself in his throat. The feeling of panic dissipated quickly, as he reassured himself something solid and firm was indeed beneath his feet.
“His reaction was much like your own.”
Holindrian looked up. He recognized that voice. “Uilliam?”
Uilliam’s long hair fell more than halfway down his back, wavy and rigid as though carved from marble, an ethereal white bearing just the traces of its past golden color. His face narrow and accented by sharp features framed by dark eyebrows. The eyes though, those magnificent eyes, were like windows into the past as well as portals to the future. They were an electric blue, the pupil an orb of mystical energy. Holindrian could see it all, the whole of the history of Uilliam’s race encapsulated within those eyes.
The Before…the Aeternam’s eyes could not or would not reveal the secrets pertaining to the Before, though there were shadows, vague, indefinite figures standing on the edge of history…something or someone had knowledge of the Before, and they were out there, somewhere. Uilliam had met them.
What could be seen was the ending that gave rise to humanity’s beginning. Space and time emerged from oblivion, a singular fixed point of eternity. There was no sound; it had not yet been invented. There was light of untold intensity, rings of magenta and sapphire clouds that swirled, intermingling, mixing. Then came flashes, all different shades of reds, oranges, yellows, and blues, rippling throughout the nebulous clouds like the pattering of rain on a pond. A wave of warm, tender, and loving heat washed over him. Holindrian could feel the fiery heat as birthing contractions on a boundless scale shuttled the first generation of galaxies into existence, infusing them with life, spiraling engines of genesis. Ah! There was the sound. It had finally caught up. It came as a rushing roar, a wind sweeping through streets and between buildings just as it would through ageless trees and over sky-kissing mountains.
Author Bio:
Macaulay is a graduate of the University of Arizona where he received his bachelor's degree in political science with an emphasis in American government and international relations as well as a minor in classical (Greco-Roman) history. He is also an alumnus of the fraternity Phi Delta Theta, where he served in a variety of leadership positions, including two terms as president. Macaulay received a master's of legal studies from Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law before beginning a career in the commercial construction industry. He has worked on a variety of projects, from airports to data centers. Macaulay lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife and their two dogs. In March 2025, Macaulay released the science fiction novel "Holindrian & The Human Revolution". He is currently pursuing a doctorate in public administration where he is researching the impacts of public education and policy shifts on the industry and investigating recommendations to rectify the on-going skilled labor shortage across the country.
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